Column
Atheism
Creed
7 min read

Confessions of an atheist philosopher. Part 1: born to be atheist, born to be anxious

In the first of a series, Stefani Ruper tells of the first steps on her journey from secular philosopher to a person of faith.

Stefani Ruper is a philosopher specialising in the ethics of belief and Associate Member of Christ Church College, Oxford. She received her PhD from the Theology & Religion faculty at the University of Oxford in 2020.

Cartoon God over painting

My name is Stefani. I was a committed atheist for almost my entire life. I studied religion to try to figure out how to have spiritual fulfillment without God. I tried writing books on spirituality for agnostics and atheists, but I gave up because the answers were terrible. Two years after completing my PhD, I finally realised that that’s because the answer is God. 

Today, I explain how and why I decided to walk into Christian faith. 

Here at Seen & Unseen I am publishing a six-article series highlighting key turning points or realisations I made on my walk into faith. It tells my story, and it tells our story too. 

I began having panic attacks about dying and the meaning of life when I was four years old. I would lay in bed at night and beat my head against the mattress while imagining what it would be like to stop existing. What would it be like to cease to be? I had no idea, but it seemed too horrible to fathom. I literally tore my hair out with the dread of it. 

Like many people in my generation, my parents had been raised in the church but left it as soon as they were able. They raised my brothers and me completely without God or other spiritual things. I had no idea of anything beyond what we could see or touch. My first exposure to God was through the TV, as He makes a few guest appearances on The Simpsons

As a child raised in today’s world, God was what Charles Taylor calls “unthinkable” to me. By “unthinkable” he means literally unthinkable. It was impossible for me to think God; it remains difficult for me to think God. But here’s the thing: this unthinkability of God—the sheer impossibility, the ridiculousness, the strangeness, the preposterousness of God, to me—was a bias I inherited from being born into this specific place and time.  

I was pre-wired to disbelieve in God.  

The thing is, every society is founded on tacit assumptions about the nature of reality. Ours, the modern West, assumes that nothing is real except for physical stuff. Philosopher Charles Taylor calls this the immanent frame. Inside the immanent frame, you can, if you like, believe in more than just what we can see and touch. But that’s a choice, and it’s one you make while others consider the things you hold most sacred as like cartoon characters lounging on clouds in the sky.  Such beliefs are difficult to maintain with grace, and people often hold them with either too much timidity or too much obstinacy; many, like my parents, eschew belief altogether. This is a recipe for a tumultuous, confusing, and often unfriendly spiritual landscape.  

The great existential trade-off 

We are the first society in the history of societies to be founded on nothingness.  A child born 500 years ago would not have been able to imagine a world without God. Back then, God was not just real but number one on the list of possibly real things. Atheism was unthinkable. God was the singular, unchanging reality upon which all material things—constantly changing and subject to decay and death—depended. You can read a little about what it was like in this review of Pentiment, an adventure game set in medieval Bavaria. 

Today, faith is, even for Christians, typically cordoned off in a little corner of life, maybe squeezed into 15 minutes on a Bible app on the way to work. But back then faith was what scholar Timothy Fitzgerald appropriately labels encompassing. God was not a hypothesis to be posed, a belief into which you could opt. God suffused the world. The transcendent encompassed all.  

Here’s how it flipped.

In 1451 Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, which made printing books faster and cheaper than ever before. New ideas about God began to spread faster than the then dominant Church could stomp them out. Within a lightning-quick five hundred years, the number of versions of the faith in Europe multiplied from one to literal thousands. 

No one was prepared for the shock of it all. People began to differentiate themselves according to their beliefs, and authorities exploited burgeoning fault lines for the sake of conflict. Between 1517 and 1648, ten million people died in the Wars of Religion. 

The things that seem the most real to us are those we share and discuss. The whole realm of the transcendent began to lose its status as unshakably real. 

What was to be done? Philosophers like John Locke offered a solution: separate the church and the state. That seemed simple enough. And in some ways, it was. But this meant our European ancestors stopped sharing and talking about their beliefs in public. The problem is that humans are social animals. The things that seem the most real to us are those we share and discuss. The whole realm of the transcendent began to lose its status as unshakably real.  

Over time, people discussed their fundamental beliefs less and less. Society even developed the notion that sharing beliefs at social gatherings like dinner parties is impolite. So religious beliefs became deeply private things, and it started to seem like people were choosing to believe them due to personal feelings or needs. This eventually made it seem to many that beliefs were mere  wishful thinking—flights of fancy, silly, and weak.  

On the opposing side, people who abstained from religious belief started to see their nonbelief as noble resistance to the temptations of wishful thinking. The idea was that being willing to view the universe as cold and uncaring was the difficult but right and brave thing to do.  Nobody wants to seem weak, and everybody wants to seem noble. The transcendent faded out of our collective consciousness. 

Or, to use Nietzsche’s terms, God died. 

Thus, God and material things swapped places in our understanding of reality. God, once the most real thing in existence, became something you could believe in if you felt like it. Material things, once viewed as constantly decaying and thus only real through God, became the unquestionably real.  

 

This isn’t normal, we weren’t made for this. We weren’t made to live without hope or homecoming or a bigger story of which we are a part. 

Today, the immanent frame reigns. But it’s not inert. It has its own compulsive, even hypnotic, powers, arguably with as strong a grip on our souls as God once had. It locks our attention on the here-and-now (as that’s all there is), and in doing so elevates the status of things like food, fashion, and entertainment in our quests for fulfillment. We throw ourselves into pleasure, hoping for relief. But immanence leads nowhere except back into itself, like an Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail.   

Immanence is so pervasive we take for granted that this is just the way things are. And yet young children do things like tear their hair out trying to make sense of what seems like an absurd existence. This isn’t normal. We weren’t made for this. We weren’t made to live without hope or homecoming or a bigger story of which we are a part. Characters in today’s novels are always buying sportscars and asking Is this all there is? Maybe it’s not. 

What if all of us are grasping at the same ultimate truth, getting little bits of it right and wrong?

Betting on transcendence 

My panic attacks made me obsessed with finding answers. The horror I felt at living in a cold and dark universe was relentless. But I also couldn’t lie to myself. A solution wouldn’t be real if it were imaginary. So as much as I wished I could believe in God, I couldn’t.  

When I learned this history of immanence however, I realised that my automatic inclination to disbelief was a bias—an inheritance of our culture, and nothing more. 

I then asked myself: 

What if, as our culture sloughed off the transcendent, it didn’t move into greater nobility, truth, and progress like it tells itself, but pre-emptively gave up on the most important thing in existence? What if all of us are grasping at the same ultimate truth, getting little bits of it right and wrong? What if some of us are on the right path, exploring relationship with a Creative power beyond our imagining that loves us, helps us, saves us?  

The fact is, when it comes to transcendence, we don’t know what’s true. No one knows with certainty. 

But we do know that immanence is a bias. And we know the first step to finding the truth is to free ourselves from bias. We must identify and untangle presumptions, then rebuild our mental frameworks as carefully as we are able.  

As for me, I’ve spent more than a decade in the academy doing this work. And in the end? Spoiler alert: I’ve thrown my hat in with transcendence.  

Article
Creed
Education
5 min read

Our social problems need theology, here’s why

Taking the god’s-eye view develops critical skills
young people listen, and ponder, to a speaker off screen.
M Accelerator on Unsplash.

At secondary school level, Religious Studies continues to attract strong numbers. On the surface, this looks like a healthy sign for the subject. Yet, critics argue that appearances can be deceiving: many faith-based schools make the subject compulsory, artificially pushing up participation. The result is a stark disconnect when students progress to higher education. Here interest appears to drop off sharply, and several universities have been forced to close their single-honours degrees in Theology and Religious Studies due to unsustainable student numbers. 

But this presents a misleading picture – even at tertiary level students are far more interested in Theology and Religious Studies than the statistics seem to suggest. While few undergraduates commit to a full degree in Theology, (in Scotland this is called Divinity) or Religious Studies, partly because career pathways outside of ordained ministry and teaching can seem unclear, many are eager to sample the subject alongside their main studies. This means that at the University of Aberdeen, the department of Divinity finds a different kind of relevance. Thanks to Aberdeen’s flexible degree structure, it is not unusual to find law, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and even physics students sitting in on our undergraduate modules. This interdisciplinary mix brings a distinctive energy to classroom discussions, as well as a few challenges… and challengers.  

Some students arrive never having opened a Bible, never having heard a word from the Qur’an, and never having engaged with any other religious text. Many are openly ambivalent about the existence of God, some downright hostile, and more than a few admit that they were drawn in by the promise of coursework-based assessment rather than traditional exams. Yet, once in the room, most engage with surprising enthusiasm, and even the challengers play a vital role.  

What emerges is a lively space where students approach theology less as a matter of personal faith and more as an intellectual exercise, grappling with life’s big questions, testing out ideas, and debating seriously with the prospect that God exists. Far from diminishing the subject, this shift gives the Divinity department a new role: not as a training ground for clergy, but as a forum for critical thinking across disciplines. 

In one of our courses for example, students are asked to debate this question: if a human chooses to go wild swimming in a crocodile’s natural habitat, does the crocodile have a right to kill and eat that human, as it would any other prey item that strayed into its path? Or, if a person with profound physical and intellectual disability is not able to live out many of the rights and responsibilities envisaged by the United Nations Convention on Human Rights, on what grounds are they still reckoned to be a human person? As we tease out the (multiple) possible answers to these questions, many of the turn out to be surprisingly theological. Whilst some students will work towards becoming better able to affirm and articulate their own atheism, others are surprised to discover that they have been living out a deistic morality all along; on the quiet, their internal moral compass believes in God. 

But my sense is that even if students don’t walk out with an easy A, they walk out with a set of skills that is, in the long run, far more valuable. 

Further to that, in an open letter the Theos think tank recently highlighted the role of theology in the ethical and cultural development of communities. They argue that theological study equips people to engage thoughtfully with different people groups and traditions, to develop skills in interfaith dialogue, and to promote communication across cultural barriers. Put simply: 

“In an increasingly polarised world, it helps us understand other points of view.” 

This insight is highly relevant to our students as they set out on varied career paths in an increasingly complex world. The skills honed in our Divinity classrooms – empathy, critical thinking, close observation, and clear writing – are both essential and transferable. Theology degrees do not lead only to ordination or teaching; they can open doors to careers in journalism, diplomacy, politics, community work, authorship, and screenwriting, among many others. As Professor Gordon Lynch, Professor of Religion, Society and Ethics at the University of Edinburgh, observed at a recent panel discussion: 

“It’s very difficult to think about a major geopolitical issue at the moment in which religion isn’t deeply implicated in some way.” 

The relevance of theological training extends far beyond traditional disciplines. For example, law students will need to recognise not only that a person with profound disability is a human person, but also to understand the deeper ethical and theological reasons why society judges this to be so. International Relations students will need to appreciate why resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict is not as simple as drawing lines on a map, but is rooted in long histories of faith, identity, and belonging – histories which will reach their influence far into the future as well as the present. Sports science and physiotherapy students will need to empathise with the human drive to become ever faster and stronger, while discerning when to help people recognise the limits before injury occurs. 

So, we gather all these students and more into our divinity courses, and work with them as they develop such skills. By discussing these matters as though God exists, in a space where there is unapologetic openness to confessional or deistic ways of looking at the world, students are freed to adopt a third-person standpoint, a “god’s-eye view” if you like, which allows them to critically examine both their own and other people’s perspectives. When this freedom becomes apparent, it is the challengers often find themselves the ones being challenged, and hostility soon morphs into vibrant dialogue. Also, for those who want “an easy A” it quickly becomes apparent that coursework-based assessment is in no way easier than traditional exams – if anything, it can be the opposite! Getting your ideas down on paper, coherently, and with relevant references to research from across disciplines is a sophisticated competency. But my sense is that even if students don’t walk out with an easy A, they walk out with a set of skills that is, in the long run, far more valuable.  

With an eye to business models and balance sheets, many universities don’t think they need their theology departments anymore, and with the current financial precarity faced by the higher education sector, on paper this may be true. But society is crying out for complex ways forwards with complex situations, and the problems of social division are becoming more apparent than ever. Whilst it is clear that fewer and fewer students are choosing to do whole theology degrees, it is also clear the world still needs theologians.

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